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Author Archives: stjewell

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.”

This week I encourage you all to read the essay Poetry is not a Luxury by Audre Lorde. Even if you are not a woman of color, I would like you to consider how her arguments might apply to your life, your poetry. Is there a hidden power in your core, in feelings you have yet to explore? I’d also like you to read two poems of hers, Hanging Fire, and Coal. Pick whichever poem resonates the most feeling in you, and then isolate that feeling, and study how it feels. Use her poetry as a leaping off point to explore your own feelings. What situation in your own life does the feeling conjure? Or perhaps you imagine a character’s situation, or a metaphor comes to mind… write as if your life depended on it.

If you could ask for a special power, what would it be? Why would you ask for that one? How does your current life (or your speaker’s life) differ from what it would be like if you could, say, fly? Read this beautiful poem by Nickole Brown, A Prayer to Talk to Animals, and observe the way she envisions this transformation. Write a poem of your own where the speaker either wishes for or actually gains a special power.

In Marie Howe’s new poetry book Magdalene, she envisions Mary Magdalene living in contemporary times. In her poem “Magdalene on Surrender”, how does the child resist change? How does the speaker of the poem resist change? When does each figure (the mother and the daughter) surrender in the poem? Who surrenders first? Write a poem that depicts an interaction between two individuals who initially conflict with each other, but as the poem progresses, allow at least one of them to surrender, either to the situation, or to the other person. If you don’t have access to the full text of the poem, you can alternatively read these three lines from another part of the same book:

Study how Kathleen Kilcup ends her poem on an open note, with an incomplete thought at the end of her poem. How does this affect your experience of the poem? What do you expect the tomb to say? Can you write a poem of your own ending with an incomplete thought (without frustrating the reader)?

This week I want you to retell a classic tale with a twist. Think of a fairy tale or myth that is close to your heart. Can you tell the story in a new way? Maybe it’s not Cinderella but the prince who leaves his shoe behind. Maybe Hansel and Gretel are so hungry and greedy they try to eat the old woman in addition to her gingerbread house. When working on your poem, try using visceral language to describe a moment that is central to the story. If it helps, you may think of what fairy tale might describe your life, or instead, write a persona poem about a character you’ve encountered who reminds you of an archetype.

Start off your poem with the statement “there are two kinds of people in the world.” Dog people and cat people? People who can cook and people who can bake? Can you find an acceptable binary to work with in the poem? Remember that the speaker of the poem does not have to have the same worldview as yourself. Check out Maya Jewell Zeller’s poem from Radar for an example.

I’m excited to announce that my first poetry chapbook is now available for purchase from dancing girl press! Thank you to everyone who helped edit it, and especially Kayt Hester for making the beautiful cover art. Check it out!

Write a poem about love without using the word love (or any derivations of it, like loving, lovely…). Instead, use as many words as you can that have “love” hidden inside of them: slovenly, glove, clover, cloven, foxglove, etc. If you choose, you could even include words like evolve and revolution, which contain the word love in them backwards.

William Carlos Williams elevates the notion of poetic measure to the status of philosophical category. “… what is reality? How do we know reality? The only reality we know is MEASURE” he writes in his essay The poem as a field of action. Though an ardent proponent of free-verse, he disagrees with contemporary wisdom and the false connotation of ‘free’ in free verse, arguing that since measure is an intrinsic feature of poetry, no verse can be truly free, that would indicate lack of measure. Free verse, he says, is synonymous to verse with variable measure, as contrasted with traditional verse having a fixed measure.